Sport—‘It's Just Healthy’: Locating Healthism within Discourses of Social Integration

Abstract

Immigration discourses in Switzerland have developed out of a fear of ‘over-foreignisation’. Central to this development are discourses of difference in which Swiss culture is centred and foreign ones are marginalised. At present, Eastern and South-East European cultures are particularly affected. In this article, we challenge perceived cultural incommensurability by examining the socialisation of second-generation girls of immigrant background, through data generated from semi-structured interviews with them. The girls draw on a tightly defined discursive range of linguistic resources to construct the meanings of sport, health and the body. Specifically, the girls refer to healthism, within which sport is seen to provide a means to achieve good health and a slim and feminine body. These references reflect a set of knowledge and discourses important to Western cultures. Alternative discursive resources exist, yet were not utilised. We argue that the girls' adoption of healthist ideas is used to counter cultural narratives—such as the uncultured, and thus non-integrated, immigrant—and that this adoption supports and maintains white healthist ideas, ‘othering’ the (foreign) other.

Keywords:

• Social Integration
• Switzerland
• Normalisation
• Healthism
• Second-Generation Girls of Immigrant Background

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers and the Managing Editor of JEMS for their helpful feedback. We are also grateful to the Swiss National Science Foundation for funding this research. The work for this article was mostly conducted when the authors were employed by the Institute of Exercise and Health Services, University of Basel.

Notes

1. ^‘Überfremdung’ is a German term that can be translated as ‘over-foreignisation’ or a fear of the foreign.

2. With the term ‘Swiss culture’, we refer to what is popularly perceived to make up ‘Swissness’. This includes dominant values and norms, as well as local customs. We concede that Swiss culture has historically developed despite, and maybe because of, cultural diversity (e.g. different languages).

3. Recruitment criteria included both level of participation in sport (ranging from no sport, to recreational club sports and high-performance participation) and level of academic performance (three levels). The sampled girls were of diverse ethnic, religious, family and social backgrounds. All were born in Switzerland. The girls' parents’ countries of origin comprised Afghanistan, Bolivia, Egypt, England, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Hungary, India, Italy, Spain, Turkey and former Yugoslavia.

4. In this research, we define sport as all forms of physical activity, which may or may not involve competitive performance.

5. In the interviews, we also talked to the girls about other aspects of their lives (e.g. school, family, education, future, school physical education, integration, immigration and immigrants). As with sport, health and the body, the girls drew on a range of resources to discuss these aspects of their lives. To illustrate the argument of this article, we could have presented any one or a combination of these aspects.

6. Foucault's panoptic idea stems from Jeremy Bentham's prison architecture. This structure consisted of an observation tower in the middle of the building, with the prisoners’ cells built around it. Each cell was placed in such a way that the prison guard could observe the prisoners, but the inmates were unable to see the supervisor or the other prisoners. Because of the constant possibility of being observed, the prisoners behaved as was asked of them. They had internalised the rules of the prison and were regulating themselves. In recent years, various scholars have moved away from the panoptic concept and developed and adopted the idea of ‘biopedagogies’ (Petherick 2011; Wright and Harwood 2009) in an attempt to reconceptualise health, the body and sport.

7. All names used in this article are pseudonyms.

8. The girls' quotes were translated into English by the first author.